Kworker And You

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red-e-made
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Joined: Sat Jul 14, 2007 11:31 am

Kworker And You

Post by red-e-made »

So, not too long ago I started wondering why my laptop sounds like a hairdryer at full power if I have so much as the browser open. I would open system monitor but could find no processes that would account for whatever was causing this. Funnily enough, after adding a top processes entry to my Conky, I found that a thing called "kworker" was eating anywhere from 25% to 50% of my CPU at any given time.

My first thought, of course, was "what the hell is kworker?" Googling around, I found that kworker controls the ACPI wakeup signals from the BIOS. I have no idea what this meant, but I did discover that this little bastard was gobbling up CPU across many distros, from Ubuntu to Arch to OpenSUSE and yes, to Mint as well. This worried me, and sure enough, I found it is indeed an upstream problem.

As you can see from the above links, there are numerous possible solutions to this problem. Some went back to the 3.5.0-12 kernel (something I'm personally not prepared to do), others went into /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts and disabled gpe18 with echo (had no effect on me). These two were the most common solutions I found popping up, anyway.

Now, for me, running Mint 14 Cinnamon, I found the simplest, most elegant solution was to simply go into BIOS (in my case, restart>F10) and reset the default settings. That's it. The machine restarted, and everything ran smooth as silk, with kworker rendered nothing more than a soft breeze through my CPU (i.e., less than one hundredth of one percent).

At first this puzzled me - I get that kworker is directly related to BIOS, but the only changes I ever made to BIOS was changing the boot device order - but to be honest, to me it's like aspirin. I don't need to know why or how it works; just that it does.

Anyway, since I keep seeing "what is up with this kworker thingy eating 90% of my CPU???" question everywhere, I thought I'd put together some resources and suggestions in one post. Hope it might be of use to some of you!
DrHu

Re: Kworker And You

Post by DrHu »

Strange indeed if only boot order, however default setting for a BIOS will also affect bus timing, caching and a few other items

Timing would be my guess for the application within the OS..
red-e-made
Level 5
Level 5
Posts: 526
Joined: Sat Jul 14, 2007 11:31 am

Re: Kworker And You

Post by red-e-made »

DrHu wrote:Strange indeed if only boot order, however default setting for a BIOS will also affect bus timing, caching and a few other items

Timing would be my guess for the application within the OS..
There were indications in this ongoing bug report - itself with some good solutions - that it often is connected to Network Manager. In my case, I can testify that wireless went out at the time kworker went berserk on me, and I was completely unable to enable wireless. Thank God for mobile broadband USBs when that happens.
revdjenk

Re: Kworker And You

Post by revdjenk »

red-e-made

Thank you!!
I have caused puzzled reactions from many in my search for a solution, and I have tried plenty! And since this has been an on-going problem through Mint 12 & 13, it really caused me to wonder if there was something wrong with THIS machine. Three other laptops running Mint13, two of them of the same vendor, Lenovo, were not exhibiting this "kworker" debacle!

This is day two since I did the suggested BIOS default reset, and all appears well...so far.

God Bless
Doug
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